KYIV – The Verkhovna Rada voted on March 29 to dismiss the highly unpopular Procurator General Viktor Shokin after months of pressure from reformers and American diplomats, who were disappointed with his resistance to and alleged sabotage of anti-corruption efforts.
Mr. Shokin was dismissed on the eve of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s March 30 working visit to Washington, where the State Department was reported to have been pressuring him for the removal for half a year. Top diplomats wasted no time in expressing their relief to see Mr. Shokin go.
European Union Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Tombinski, who was allegedly misrepresented by Mr. Shokin in a September incident, said the dismissal creates the opportunity for a new start. His sentiments were echoed by U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
“It doesn’t matter how much help the international community provides to Ukraine, how much funds and technical support Ukraine receives. Ukraine stands before the challenge of overcoming corruption,” Mr. Pyatt told a Kyiv conference on March 29, as reported by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. “That’s why today’s events in the Rada, which we highly approve of, to dismiss the discredited prosecutor general are so important.”
Mr. Shokin was the second procurator general nominated by Mr. Poroshenko (and approved by the Rada) to leave amid scandal and corruption accusations. His predecessor, Vitalii Yarema, accomplished next to nothing in his seven months.
Mr. Shokin lasted 13 months, also with no major accomplishments to speak of, other than organizing the September 17, 2015, spectacle in Parliament in which video evidence was demonstrated allegedly showing Radical Party National Deputy Ihor Mosiichuk demanding bribes for his political services.
A far graver incident involved Roman Zavorotnyi, a suspect detained by prosecutors and named a suspect in the Euro-Maidan murders for being assigned 408 automatic rifles and 90,000 bullets to distribute among the “titushky,” or hired thugs. He was released early in the morning on March 27.
“The person released was suspected in organizing murders with the help of so-called ‘titushky’ in those horrible days,” Yegor Soboliev, the deputy head of the Samopomich faction, said from the parliamentary tribune. “This is a symbol, this is the result, this is the conclusion of Viktor Shokin’s work as procurator general. He didn’t investigate any case of murder or terror during the Euro-Maidan. He didn’t investigate any corruption in high-ranking offices, before and after the Euro-Maidan. To be frank, he was appointed for that very reason: to conceal corruption at the top and the Euro-Maidan cases.”
Mr. Shokin’s legacy also includes deceiving the public, including Western diplomats.
Civic activists, including Mr. Soboliev, accused Mr. Shokin of misleading the president in September 2015 in telling him that Mr. Tombinski didn’t oppose his four nominations of candidates for the commission that was to appoint the lead prosecutor of the Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Mr. Tombinski declared soon after the president revealed this claim that he did indeed cite complaints about how Mr. Shokin was forming the commission, stressing that the public doesn’t trust the procurator general’s candidates, who were suspected of corruption. A protest was held outside Mr. Shokin’s offices demanding that he stop lying.
Within days of this scandal, Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt made his dissatisfaction with Mr. Shokin public for the first time, launching the struggle to remove him.
“Instead of supporting reforms in Ukraine and working towards rooting out corruption, the corrupt officials of the Procurator General’s Office are making things worse, openly and aggressively undermining reforms,” he said in a speech to the Odesa Financial Forum on September 25, 2015, that marked a milestone in the U.S. government’s worsening attitude toward the post-Euro-Maidan government.
“They regularly interfere with the efforts to investigate corrupt officials in the Procurator General. They intimidate and interfere with the efforts of those who work honestly within the framework of initiatives to reform the Procurator General.”
The biggest scandal marring Mr. Shokin’s tenure involved his alleged sabotage of the reformers’ attempts to arrest and prosecute the so-called “diamond prosecutors.”
In that case, two deputy procurators general allegedly attempted to pressure young prosecutorial investigators during the summer to drop their bribery charges against two key officials they arrested on July 6: the former first deputy head of the Procurator General’s Main Investigative Administration, Volodymyr Shapakin, and former deputy prosecutor of the Kyiv Oblast, Oleksandr Korniyets.
These two officials – known as the “diamond prosecutors” because 65 diamonds were found in Mr. Korniyets’s possession during their arrest – were soon dismissed from their positions after public pressure. They were detained and released on bail.
Deputy Prosecutor General David Sakvarelidze vowed in December that they would eventually be prosecuted as the evidence had been prepared, yet that has yet to happen. He said the defendants were delaying their review of the materials. Mr. Korniyets has also claimed to be ill.
The conflict over the diamond prosecutors raged for months, culminating in intense political battles in recent weeks between the teams of Mr. Shokin and Mr. Sakvarelidze, one of several professionals invited from abroad (Georgia, in his case) and given Ukrainian citizenship in order to conduct reforms to satisfy Western donors.
He announced on March 24 that members of his team of prosecutors, investigators and IT specialists looking into the diamond prosecutors were being dismissed, one after the other.
The dismissed prosecutors “worked honestly and didn’t fear challenging corrupt officials on all levels, including those close to the leadership of the Procurator General’s Office,” Mr. Sakvarelidze told a March 27 press conference. “As a result, they paid the price by becoming the target of revenge by Shokin and his team.”
The Ukrinform news agency confirmed 17 dismissals, of prosecutors and others, citing anonymous sources.
Mr. Sakvarelidze went for the jugular in his March 24 press conference, accusing Mr. Shokin of having direct corrupt links with the diamond prosecutors. He joined a protest that day outside the Procurator General’s Office, drawing accusations of violating the law that forbids prosecutors from participating in political events.
Prosecutors in many oblasts signed a collective letter expressing their outrage over Mr. Sakvarelidze’s actions, followed by deputies of the Odesa Oblast Council, who demanded his dismissal.
Mr. Shokin duly satisfied that request with a March 29 decree firing Mr. Sakvarelidze, just hours before his own dismissal by Parliament, citing his rival’s “gross violations of prosecutorial ethics,” among other offenses.
Meeting with Mr. Sakvarelidze that day, Mr. Poroshenko said he will discuss with the new prosecutor general the possibility of him returning to his position, Mr. Sakvarelidze revealed in an interview with the nv.ua news site. Also on the day of the dismissal, one of Mr. Sakvarelidze’s prosecutorial appointments in Odesa was arrested for allegedly receiving a bribe of $5,000.
The other reform-oriented deputy prosecutor embroiled in the diamond prosecutor battles was Vitalii Kasko, the Lviv-born deputy prosecutor who was forbidden by Mr. Shokin in mid-January to travel to Washington as part of a delegation to discuss anti-corruption measures.
Singled out for praise by Mr. Pyatt in his Odesa speech, Mr. Kasko announced his resignation on February 15 after consulting with his Western advisors, after he and they determined he had no other option.
“The last straw became the latest redistribution of the Procurator General’s Office’s work,” he told a press conference. “Shokin took away from me all the functions and instruments to work on the cases that our team began to work on, including the ‘diamond prosecutors.’ The Procurator General’s Office is a dead body in whose independence no one believes.”
The president’s second failure to appoint a competent prosecutor general prompted national deputies to take to the parliamentary tribune on March 29 and propose various reforms to ensure its independence, including a constitutional amendment suggested by Ihor Lutsenko of the Batkivshchyna party and an open selection process suggested by Leonid Yemets of the People’s Front party.
National Deputy Mustafa Nayyem of the Poroshenko Bloc declared that the Euro-Optimists group of 27 deputies has already endorsed Serhii Horbatiuk to be Mr. Shokin’s replacement.
Mr. Horbatiuk has worked in the Procurator General’s Office since 2004 and is currently in charge of investigating the crimes committed during the Euro-Maidan. He is also endorsed by the lawyers of the families of the Heavenly Hundred.
Yet Kyiv political insiders such as Volodymyr Fesenko and news sources such as pravda.com.ua claim Mr. Poroshenko is leaning towards Yurii Stoliarchuk, a current deputy procurator general who is widely identified as being part of Mr. Shokin’s inner circle. Needless to say, the Euro-Optimists are opposed.
“Stoliarchuk’s first mistake was to declare his intention to question U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, which violates international conventions,” National Deputy Serhiy Leshchenko of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc told Hromadske Television. “Secondly, under his oversight is a criminal case against the Center for Counteracting Corruption regarding his alleged spending of American funds. Thirdly, he proposed that Horbatiuk be exiled to the Lviv Oblast. In other words, he took enough steps in one week to make his candidacy impossible.”
Ukraine’s Procurator General’s Office is responsible for enforcing the law, prosecuting the criminal charges filed by police and punishing those convicted. It has been notoriously corrupt ever since Ukraine gained independence and is widely viewed as the key source of the nation’s lawlessness and legal dysfunction.
Only rarely has anyone of influence been prosecuted in the last 25 years. Among those to evade punishment were the organizers of the Sknyliv 2001 air show disaster that resulted in 77 deaths, the organizers of the Heorhii Gongadze kidnapping that ended in his murder, the falsifiers of the 2004 elections that prompted the Orange Revolution and the organizers of the violence and murders throughout the Euro-Maidan protest of 2013-2014.
Reported economic crimes costing the government hundreds of billions of dollars throughout independence have also gone unpunished.
The most notable prosecution was that of Viktor Lozinskyi, a local oligarch and former national deputy who in 2009 murdered a local villager in the Kirovohrad Oblast for trespassing on his privately owned land.
He served four years’ and 36 days’ imprisonment before a judge ruled on February 25 to release him based on the recently approved Savchenko law, which counts every day spent in a holding cell in pre-trial detention as two days’ imprisonment.